covid is over. it's been over the day we got something else we are supposed to be agitated about. at this point, it feels like a distant memory. nobody cares or pretends to care about it anymore. so why shouldn't we go back to the old normal?
Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work
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Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work
#262Remote work is about the only thing where I very much disagree with Musk. I get it for engineering physical things. But not for web software. In that area, remote works much better than in-office, at least for me.
I agree, but I think either full on-site or fully remote are both leagues better than partially remote. Partially remote is far worse than either - because now all the in-person tactics exclude the remote folks, and all the remote work tactics are an unnecessary burden to the in-office folks. An all-remote team of heads-down engineers is 99% as good as in-person, if not better, because now all the communication has b…
Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work
#263I have to admit if I was an executive and I watched one of those "day in the life of" tiktoks from twitter employees that show them spending maybe 20% of their day doing work and the other 80% enjoying company amenities I might be considering tightening things up as well.
Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work
#264At this point why would anyone want to stay at twitter? The mood must be absolutely abysmal.
Definitely check with Twitter employees before assuming that. On the one hand yeah, maybe. On the other, if I was depressed with how off-course my company had gotten, watching someone come in and clean house / shake things up would be very exciting.
Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work
#265> over the next few days, the absolute top priority is finding and suspending any verified bots/trolls/spam. Would it improve the situation to simply require a CAPTCHA once per day per non-subscriber to tweet? I would think it would greatly increase the cost to operate a troll farm, but have minimal impact on real users (setting aside accessibility and third-party clients a moment). If it causes attrition because som…
Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work
#266I am split on the remote work thing from a productivity / creativity perspective. I do think there are times when I'm less productivity working from home compared to the office. I also think as a team we're less creative. Some of the best stuff I've done in my career has come out of casual conversations with my team about the stuff we're building. I've noticed I don't think about what I'm building as much when workin…
My take is probably a bit more hot and less to do with anything provable. I think the real reason for "return to work" is to justify high salaries. If everyone dispersed across the United States then people in the highest markets would get significant drops in pay. It's no secret that subsidizing extremely high housing costs has the benefit of earning those people more than the average worker doing the same work over…
Most engineer salaries however are substantially higher on the west coast than in the midwest, much higher than a $12k pay bump that would have covered the difference in housing costs for average 1 bedrooms between these markets.
I don't think its so much that engineers on the west coast pay a lot more in cost of living and therefore have to get a higher salary to put food on the table the same as they do out east. I think its simply that engineers who happen to be on the west coast are tapped into an excellent network of job opportunities and tend to be highly trained, and for companies to get at this network for its talent themselves, they need to pay these inflated west coast rates to get into the door. This is just what the prices of this market have come to be, and they must have gotten to such a point through other factors than the paltry in comparison difference in cost of living.
Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work
#267covid is over. it's been over the day we got something else we are supposed to be agitated about. at this point, it feels like a distant memory. nobody cares or pretends to care about it anymore. so why shouldn't we go back to the old normal?
Because we like the new normal.
Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work
#268The one-sidedness of the comments in this thread surprise me. If you want to work remotely, don’t work at Twitter. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with Musk thinking it’s more beneficial for his employees to work in the office. He has goals and methods of working towards them. He wants likeminded people to work towards those goals. Can you really not think of pros and cons of either situation? To give my opinion, if…
Switching that up from one day to the next is just inhuman cruelty without empathy. I’m not even taking any kind of legal perspective, just a purely ethical one. The disruption to employee’s lives can be enormous.
I’m so happy to live in a country where this would be quite illegal to do.
Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work
#269You need code for a new feature? Buy a startup that already wrote it. You need to keep something running? Contract out instead of employees.
Very few companies have a full time plumber or carpenter or electrician on staff (except for obvious obscure exceptions of course). He might be planning bigger changes than people seem to think.
What fundamentally does twitter do? Sell ads by moving data around using enormous first mover advantage of account numbers. And that needs a huge employee count why exactly? I am not asking that it did, or it did in the early days of the technology, or what the competitors do.
All industries, after the heavy employment phase, move into a value extraction phase. He seems to be betting on the heavy employment phase being over for tweeting. Honestly the only question is timing, is he just right or too early?
Maybe tweeting is now like railroads or heavy industry, no longer employs entire neighborhoods or even cities. Maybe SV is about to become the new Detroit.
Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that there are pros and cons to remote work, and that it should be possible to have a frank discussion about where the balance lies. However, that is sadly irrelevant to this news item, as Musk isn't banning remote work because of any logical consideration of its merits. He's banning remote work because he's an authoritarian micromanager who believes that workers are to be treated like cattle.
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If you're claiming his paying them out-of-pocket, can you provide a citation?